At present, for each subscriber in a telephone exchange, there are about 130 subscriber functions. Most (about 80%) of these functions are of a nature that that does not allow any changes to be made in them by the subscriber him/herself via his/her telephone. Generally, these functions are also operator-specific rather than subscriber-specific. In practice, for about 90% of the subscribers in the exchange, these functions are the same.
For each subscriber, an individual subscriber record of a length under one hundred bytes for has been reserved the storage of subscriber functions. When a subscription is created, certain default functions are created for it, and these can be defined specifically for the operator and for the exchange in conjunction with the delivery of the exchange and later using MML (Man Machine Language, MML) commands. However, once the subscription has been created, there is no information available as to whether the functions included in the default set of functions are still valid for the subscriber or whether they have been changed.
A problem with the present arrangement is the slowness of any operations pertaining to subscriber functions. For instance, if all subscribers in an exchange are to be given the right to call transfer, then it will be necessary to use MML commands applying to the functions defined for each subscriber. As there are hundreds of thousands of subscribers, this process may take several weeks.
On the other hand, if subscribers are to be transferred from one exchange to another, then it will be necessary to first read all the subscribers in the old exchange, in other words, a MML command is issued that will print out the functions defined for each subscriber. After that, the functions for each subscriber are read one by one. In this way, the data for hundreds of subscribers at a time are transferred to a computer, whereupon they are created again in the other exchange using MML commands via the computer in question. These operations are repeated in batches of a few hundred subscribers until all the subscribers have been transferred. Although the transfer is carried out by computer, it has to be done at a quiet time at night, so the time available for this is about five hours a day. In addition, since the data in question is in ASCII form (American Standard Code for Information Interchange, ASCII) and has to be processed character by character, the process for each subscriber takes as long as 20–30 seconds. For example, to complete the transfer of a hundred thousand subscribers in practice takes several weeks.
The object of the present invention is to disclose a new type of method that will eliminate the drawbacks described above. A specific object of the present invention is to disclose a method and system for the optimisation of subscriber functions and their management.